


monsters and heroes

by serenfire



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Caitlin is a boss, Character Study, Coda to 2x18 'Versus Zoom', Dark, F/M, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, More Than Canon-Typical Violence, Non-Linear Narrative, Speculation, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 00:51:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6634390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenfire/pseuds/serenfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jay Garrick is dying is Hunter Zolomon is dying is Zoom is dying is dying dying dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	monsters and heroes

**Author's Note:**

> Sooo.... 'Versus Zoom' was kinda a clusterfuck, what with the Bechdel test fail and the glaring plot holes. So, instead of actually using my Fic Skills to fix any of this mess, I'm going focus on Caitlin because she is brilliant and very misused in this ep.
> 
> And therefore she deserves to be put through the wringer. I guess.
> 
> @anyone I know irl: do not read thanks

“It’s fun, pretending to be a hero,” Jay growls, smirking, teeth white and blinding, the perversion of the Flash suit hanging off his limbs, limp. Awkward.

Terrifying.

Caitlin can’t move, can’t make a sound, just watches as he picks up Barry like a rag doll and slams him against the wall. Her nerves freeze, ice cold, as Barry struggles, life and breath tumbling from his lips.

And then she snaps; screams at Zolomon like she knows what she’s doing, like she has an ace up her sleeve to guarantee they all make it out of here alive.

Jay — stops. Wrenches himself off Barry, leaves him a huddled mess on the floor.

Grabs Caitlin by the collar, drags her away with him in a flash of V7.

*

“You’re not a hero,” she cries at him, savagely swiping with everything but her fists; her will, her soul. “You’re a monster.”

He tears off Barry with an inhuman cry, something in his eyes more monstrous than before. It was fun pretending to be a hero, maybe. But the real Jay, the real Hunter — he could only be comfortable in his own skin. Admitting to killing almost thirty people, smiling while he said he had no remorse, shrugging like what can you do?

It’s more real than Caitlin’s ever seen him.

He’s not a hero. He’s not, he can’t be. The faces of the twenty-seven dead have been plastered to the lab’s monitors for the past week, and Caitlin hasn’t once been able to look away from them. How can one be a hero, when one has killed so many?

How can one be human?

*

It’s been months since Caitlin could look in the mirror without flinching, avoiding the bathrooms in her apartment, the lab. If she doesn’t look at herself, maybe she won’t see her doppelganger, won’t stop seeing inhumanly blue eyes glaring at her and hair shock-white.

Caitlin’s never laid eyes on her doppelganger before, and even Cisco closed up before revealing any juicy details to her. But sometimes, if the shards of glass reflect her pale skin, exhausted rings, quivering breath back at her, she can imagine a breath of cold air, a twitch of ice in the deepest part of her palm, the white-hot will to see life freeze in front of her, like bodies in a freezer.

It’s the same feeling, surrounded by bodies hot and dripping blood, bodies chalk to the brim with ice and struggling helplessly for life, that Caitlin gets when she locks metahumans up in the labs. The same gut feeling of triumph, of ecstasy.

Every time, she wakes up in a cold sweat.

After a while, she hugs her overcoat to her body as she walks to work every day, glancing in every alley as if to see Ronnie come back from the dead, but the wrong Ronnie, with Professor Stein’s eyes and a taste for scorched flesh. She sees nothing in the alleys but trash and doors to buildings Caitlin will never go in, an underbelly of Rogues and common thieves Caitlin will only observer from the other side.

That is, unless she wants to.

She goes up the elevator to her lab every day, her mouth dry. She doesn’t know if her soul hungers for blood, only that her mind does not.

She buys a small hunting knife and carries it in her purse, to protect herself, in case any other metas from any other Earths come looking for her.

(To protect herself without calling out the beast within her.)

*

Sure, Caitlin will laugh and tease Cisco for assuming she will become Killer Frost because her doppelganger is. Because her doppelganger was cursed (blessed?) with the metahuman gene, doesn’t mean Caitlin will respond to the same stimuli and become evil.

She does the mental math. Ronnie has lived and died, and she has never once truly wanted to pick up a mask and go slaughter innocents. Cisco has developed his latent powers, and never once has she been jealous of his trials. Her life does not revolve around her friends; she does not rely on them to guide her actions.

Caitlin would have been the happiest person alive to live and work with Ronnie by her side, talking about Ph.D. work and Arctic research and grant opportunities. She would have been completely fine to leave Harrison Wells after STAR Labs, to distance the event like every single one of her colleagues. If she had Ronnie, she would do that.

If she had Ronnie, though, would they both turn evil? Would they both be metahumans, out for power and glory? Going out similarly in a blaze of glory?

Caitlin doesn’t know the answers to these questions; hopes they are a resounding no. But she polishes her knife and practices her moves from instructions off of YouTube, hones her techniques. If anyone comes calling, if anyone comes to bring her to the dark side or to take her away from the light, she is ready to fight them her way: in self-defence, not aggression.

Caitlin Snow does not have an aggressive bone in her body.

No, that’s false. This Caitlin Snow isn’t aggressive, isn’t a warrior. That Caitlin Snow definitively is.

She keeps her reflexes sharp and her head down, prepared to face whatever fucked up destiny may await her head on, pulling no punches. Caitlin Snow, ordinary human scientist, is ready.

*

Jay Garrick is Hunter Zolomon is Zoom.

Caitlin can’t breathe. She remembers going with Jay to people watch on that bench in the park that summer’s day; she remembers him casually pointing out his doppelganger like it was an everyday event: hey, that’s the guy with my face. He doesn’t have my same name, isn’t that weird?

And she had never even second guessed him.

Jay Garrick is dying is Hunter Zolomon is dying is Zoom is dying is dying dying dying.

Jay Garrick is dead, punched through the heart by himself. Himself in a dark suit and a mask that melts to his face like hot oil, is the being from her nightmares half the time.

The other half, the nightmare is herself. She is working for Zoom, she is a loyal servant, using the ice that freezes her veins to hunt for his enemies. She has sworn to him, not because she had to, but because she believed in him.

Caitlin thinks, when she wakes up in a cold sweat every night: is this how I become Frost in this timeline? Do I follow Jay because Ronnie is dead? Is the motivation for Frost betraying Zoom my motivation for joining him?

If Jay asks me to join him, will I say no? Will I have enough courage to refuse him, and watch my death play out like destiny?

Caitlin goes back to sleep, but always restlessly. Always. The knife shines from her bedstand, waiting for her searching hands. The reminder that she is human, that she is not meta, that she is not Jay. Hunter. Whatever.

None of her teammates spend any amount of time asking how she feels about Jay not only being dead, but also being evil. Evil and not so very much dead. They assume that she’s already made her peace with his passing, and the subsequent revelations about his evilness really doesn’t have much effect on her.

They’re wrong.

She remembers the kiss, she remembers the awkward longing for someone who’s just as every bit heroic as Barry, but has time for her, but values her as a person and talks like someone who is interested in the Caitlin Snow, person, not Caitlin Snow, human GPS for the Flash.

And bomb maker. Not to forget that.

And if all that was a lie — “If any of that was true, just let Barry go!” she screams at Jay, at Hunter, at Zoom. At the shadow of the shade who paid attention to her. At the one who rejected her actual cure in favor of killing people and sapping Barry of his strength and life for a permanent fix.

Caitlin has to take medicine every day for her myriad of physical problems and mental illnesses. That Jay would just ignore it as a viable solution and instead kill people is unacceptable at the highest level.

And because Jay either recognizes what they had as real, or he’s come to the realization that killing Barry will only result in instant death, he lets Barry go. Caitlin can’t come to terms with the possibility that he actually believed in what they had, under such pretenses. Under all the pretenses.

She clutches the knife in her pocket. If only she could get close enough — but she can’t. He’s Zoom.

So she uses her words, spits at him. “You’re not a hero. You’re a monster.”

But isn’t she living proof that one can be both?

*

Caitlin is in complete disarray. Jay took her and she lurched, dragged by her collar, and ended up in this place. This dark place, in a cage, grilled bars blocking her escape.

Only Zoom is in with her, pushing her against the wall, locking her wrist to a brick wall. Somewhere, water drips.

He’s a complete monster, nothing but. The people he saved while he was the Flash — the people he saved ‘to give them hope’ — don’t count. The people that didn’t die don’t count. He is nothing but a monster, nothing but the dark fabric swathing him.

And Caitlin knows that if she accepts that, she will never be able to accept what she does next. Because her existing as a human, not as a meta out for revenge, dictates that Caitlin Snow is both a hero fighting next to the Flash and a monster, next to Zoom. Caitlin doesn’t know what this Hunter Zolomon is doing, if he is at the park again today, reading, with his mother not having been murdered in front of his eyes, having grown up in a household of peace.

She wonders if the character of the not-Jay Garrick makes him both hero and monster, if what she screamed at him was false. 

Caitlin remembers vividly: Barry choking, Barry slowing down on the treadmill, Jay grabbing the vial containing Speed Force, eyes hard and set, his one goal in hand. A monster.

The question is, will Caitlin be remembered as a monster for this?

Zoom is tying up her wrist, scowling at the other prisoners. Still in her cell. Still inches away from her, completely unaware. Like everyone else, to him she is nothing like Killer Frost. She is only Caitlin Snow, meek scientist, the one who will never turn bad. Who is perfect bait, because she has never expected this to happen.

How she will prove him wrong.

He’s right in front of her, hot breath and a dazed expression in his eyes. High on life, high on speed, high on the prospect of not dying any more.

But even speedsters can’t evade death, especially when they’re not looking for it.

Caitlin steels her nerves, so waxy only moments ago, because this is the final thing that makes her the one and only Caitlin Snow of this universe, unique and unpredictable. This is what makes her the same or different than Killer Frost.

So she closes her eyes, remembers the YouTube videos. Remembers the alleyways, and the nightmares, and the dreams of Jay’s eyes when she thought he was dead and still a hero.

And Caitlin takes the knife out of her pocket, grips it in her fist with white knuckles, and with her free hand, slides it in between Jay’s ribs. Leaves it there, her hand still on it.

He coughs, at first, confused. He’s Zoom, he’s invincible now, he can phase through anything. But he is still, despite all odds, human. He may be monster and he may be hero, but he is human.

Caitlin sticks it between his ribcage, in his side, piercing his internal organs. It’s so easy. The knife she has polished so many times, sharpened to a sparkle, practiced against empty air, meets flesh and bone and separates the two, sticking in sinew, pressing through it. Staying.

She doesn’t know if she can feel the tear of his lungs through the tremors in her wrist when Jay coughs, looking down at his chest, where the dull red blooms on his dark suit, where the gut wound lodges like a parasite.

And he looks up at her slowly, while coughing, blood frothing at his mouth, lung punctured. Lung filling. Heart still bleeding. His hood was discarded ages ago, and he has matted hair from his hood, looks just like Barry after a mission, if Caitlin isn’t shackled to a wall in a makeshift prison. 

He’s outraged, jerky, and electricity crackles over him as he backs away from Caitlin’s knife, against the bars, but coughs, electrifying, blood on the ground and on Caitlin, a hand pressed against his side, blood still seeping through his hand.

The only thing Caitlin thinks is that she should have twisted the knife. Maybe that would have hurried this up. Watching him die is like  — well. Like dying herself.

Zoom hits the ground, struggling for breath, half phasing through the cell floor, blood flowing freely from his gut. He looks up at Caitlin wordlessly, a single unspoken question: why?

She tells him, as the light drains out of his eyes. She tells him why.

“I’m not a hero, Zolomon. I’m just a normal person. And us normal people — inside, we’re monsters, too.”

His breath drains to a rattle, his heartbeat evens out as the blood spilling across the floor slows to a halt. Caitlin’s boots are soaked in it, the lifeless lifeblood collecting in her clothing like a parasite.

Caitlin wipes her knife on her jeans, slips it back into her pocket, and leans against the wall until the police arrive.

She would always mean what she said, Caitlin thinks as she sits and waits for their arrival. Monsters and heroes make up everyone, including those destined to choose a side.

Killer Frost was evil and dead.

Caitlin Snow is —

Caitlin Snow is who she is. A human scientist, a lawful person. But that doesn’t make her a hero or a monster.

She is a hero and a monster because she simply is, not because anyone forced her to choose one or the other.

Destiny is tricky like that, you see. 

**Author's Note:**

> please follow me at my [tumblr](http://www.trans-reyskywalker.tumblr.com)!


End file.
